Personal computers (PCs) have become ubiquitous and indispensable tools in a wide variety of fields ranging from simple personal communication to critical business applications. Moreover, the use of peripherals has considerably increased the power and ease of use of personal computers. In addition to internal peripheral expansion cards, many external peripherals that can be easily attached and detached to PCs are now commonly available.
The proliferation of external peripherals has been facilitated by the universal serial bus (USB) standard that defines a fast, bidirectional serial interface. USB allows dynamic attachment and detachment of a wide variety of peripherals to a USB host formed as part of a PC, without requiring a reboot.
At the same time, concurrent or sequential use of multiple computing devices has become common place. For example, a user may wish to use a laptop and a desktop computing device for clerical or office task. Likewise, a user may wish to switch between a gaming computer and an office computer. Typically, each computing device is interconnected to its own dedicated set of peripherals and display.
Some modern displays provide multiple video inputs, which allow them to be interconnected to two or more computing devices. This allows a single display to be shared among many computing devices, thereby obviating the need for multiple displays. To use a selected computing device interconnecting such a display, the video input interconnected with the currently selected computing device may be enabled while the rest of the video inputs are disabled. Nevertheless, each computing device still requires equipped with its own set of peripherals. Unfortunately, this requires the user to utilize separate sets of peripherals to interact with different computing devices.
Known methods for sharing displays and peripherals among many computers have many disadvantages. Maintaining multiple sets of peripherals is costly and also consumes space and energy. In addition, disconnecting and reconnecting video or peripheral interconnections is a cumbersome and inefficient way to use a display and peripherals with multiple host computing devices.
Accordingly, there remains a need for new methods and devices that allow efficient and convenient sharing of display and peripherals, among multiple computing devices.